Taco Hoekwater, interviewee:
I grew up in a small town in the
Netherlands, and after some moving around, I now live in the nearby
city of Dordrecht. My wife and I live in a small house that stands on
the side of a dike. We have been married since 1993, and we have three
cats and two dogs.

Ever since I was a small kid, I have had an interest in history,
and especially the history of the applied arts. I read lots of fantasy
and SF novels (that is a very nice way to spend the many rainy nights we
have here in Holland).

I have started studies in art history and philosophy, but never
finished those because I got side-tracked when I was drafted for the
army in 1992 and came in touch with computers & TeX.

DW: When and how did you first get involved with TeX and its
friends?

TH: In the military, I was trained as a system administrator for a
communications minicomputer that ran Unix System V. Because the
actual machine was not a very suitable teaching environment we were
encouraged to install Linux on the PS workstations that came with it.

The distribution was one of the earlier Slackwares that came on a
few dozen floppy disks, with a sub-1.0 linux kernel, and a bunch of the
floppy disks were labelled “nTeX”. I was immediately hooked, mostly
because of the `arts and crafts' feel of TeX compared to the
`industrialized' approach of line-printers and telexes that were
prevalent.

When I was released from the army, I discovered that thanks to
changed laws, I could not financially afford to finish my studies,
so I searched for a job, and soon found one as a AllTeX expert for
Kluwer Academic Publishers.

DW: How “expert” were you with computers and TeX by the time you
got out of the army and went to work for Kluwer?

TH: The nice thing about being drafted for the Dutch army at that time
was that there wasn't much work to do, leaving lots of time for study.
After two years of doing that, I was pretty good with PCs (MS-DOS)
as well as Unix systems.

However, my knowledge of TeX and friends was basically limited to
the plain and manmac macros. The first document I have ever compiled
was Michael Doob's `A Gentle introduction to TeX'. I was definitely not
a `TeX wizard' when I started working for Kluwer, just a more or less
competent `TeXnician'.

DW: Do you still work for Kluwer, and what did you or do you do
at Kluwer — are you still a “AllTeX expert” or do you do something
else for work now?

TH: Working at the prepress department of a large publisher proved to
be a very fast way to improve my TeX knowledge. In my first year at
Kluwer, I wore out one copy of The TeXbook and one copy of Lamport's
book completely. The job was two-sided: provide support for the
TeX-based authors, and help the internal LaTeX typesetters with the
fine details of typesetting documents according to the typesetters'
instructions.

This meant creating a modularized LaTeX2e class file to replace the
two dozen or so separate 2.09 styles, and the compilation, distribution
and maintenance of an internal TeX distribution based on emTeX so
that all typesetters were guaranteed to use the same TeX macro and font
files.

Later on, Kluwer's interest shifted away from TeX and toward SGML
documents and workflows. I worked roughly two years on the development
of the SGML article DTD and a backend system that could typeset those
SGML documents — using TeX, of course. These SGML-related
activities took up almost all of my office hours, but my TeX support
work continued on a freelance basis. I had a private company for that:
it was called Bittext and it did typesetting, macro programming, and
Metafont developments.

In 2000, I left Kluwer and abandoned Bittext to join a three-person
company that my brother-in-law had started. The company is called
`Elvenkind', and I still work there today. We focus mostly on
database text format conversions and creating web applications to access
that data, but we also still do a small amount of style file (I should
say class file) design and even a some actual typesetting. Currently, I
am working nearly full-time on the successor of pdfTeX, thanks to a grant
from Colorado State University.

DW: I saw your name listed on the announcement of the upcoming
ConTeXt users meeting; please tell me how you became involved and about
your involvement with ConTeXt and, I assume, Hans Hagen.

TH: I ran into ConTeXt first when I was working on that SGML backend
system for Kluwer, around 1996. For that, I needed a macro toolkit that
was more reliable and predictable than LaTeX could offer at that time.
As it happens, Hans Hagen had just given some lectures about ConTeXt
during one of the Dutch Language TeX User Group (NTG) meetings.

ConTeXt was still commercial software then, so we invited Hans over
to the Kluwer office for talks about licensing and eventually reached
an agreement. So, Kluwer ended up being one of the very first users of
ConTeXt, and I have been in touch with Hans ever since.

DW: But that doesn't describe your current involvement with the
world of ConTeXt.

TH: I have to go back in history a bit first. In the beginning,
ConTeXt was lacking in a few areas that were a must-have for academic
publishing. Most notable of those were mathematics and bibliographic
referencing, so I wrote the initial support for that. Also, Kluwer
needed an SGML parser on top of the core macros, so I developed one.
(That SGML parser is not the one used in ConTeXt right now, by the
way; the current code is an independent development by Hans himself.)

All of that increased my knowledge of low-level ConTeXt enormously,
and being one of the first users of ConTeXt outside of Hans's company
Pragma ADE quickly turned me into a `resident TeXnician'
on the ConTeXt
mailing list. I've been answering quite a lot of questions there over
the past years.

Right now, I manage a few of the details related to releasing new
versions: I compose the release notes for every official released
version of ConTeXt, I run a mirror of Pragma ADE's web site
(http://context.aanhet.net), I take care of uploading the
distribution to CTAN, and I am the maintainer of the `museum', a
repository of more than a hundred old versions dating back almost a
decade: http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev.

DW: Please tell me how you became involved and about your
involvement with MetaPost and your ambitions for that project.

TH: You may be aware that ConTeXt uses MetaPost as an in-line
drawing engine for TeX. Hans being Hans, he always has feature requests
for every tool he uses, and MetaPost was no exception. Bogusław
Jackowski, also a heavy MetaPost user, also had some wishes. Somehow
they got together, and because Hans knew I had some experience in
WEB programming, he dragged me into it, mostly to verify the
feasibility of some of their requests.

As it turned out, John Hobby himself was no longer interested in
doing development on MetaPost, and he generously agreed with a group
from the TeX user groups taking over. Hans and Bogusław do quality
assurance and testing, Karl Berry takes care of the web site, Troy
Henderson has just volunteered to keep the manual up-to-date (he takes
over from Karl), there is a mailing list with people contributing
requests and patches, and I do actual web coding, release new versions,
and travel around giving talks and gathering bugs and feature requests.

I do not have much of a mathematical background, so my personal
goals for MetaPost are mostly related to software engineering. Like, I
want to make it possible that MetaPost be built as a library that can
easily be embedded within pdfTeX. And we have a pending patch from
Giuseppe Bilotta that increases the precision of MetaPost's internal
calculations quite a lot, but it needs quite some extra web source code
that is not written yet. It would also be nice if one day MetaPost
could output OpenType fonts directly.

All of these are fairly modest goals; larger projects will have to
wait until later. Hopefully, a steady stream of news will convince some
people to give MetaPost a try, and then perhaps the core group will
grow enough so that we can tackle larger tasks like three-dimensional
drawing or real world modelling.

DW: You mentioned earlier that you are now working on a
successor to pdfTeX. Scouting around a bit, I find that you are
(also?) involved in supporting OpenType fonts in pdfTeX,
providing better support for Arabic typesetting in TeX, and with
LuaTeX. Are these different projects really one and the same or, if
not, how do these various projects (and any others that may be related)
fit together? Also, does this mean you are working closely with people
like Hàn Thế Thành and Martin Schröder? I guess my meta question is,
“Are you in fact working (with others?) on a plan to
create a consolidated successor to several separate projects that have
existed in the past and thus, to some extent, provide the long awaited
production-quality successor to TeX?”

TH: All those TeX-related projects are facets of a single big
project: making a worthy successor for pdfTeX. pdfTeX is lacking in
some areas; for instance, it does not have the multi-lingual
functionality of Aleph or XeTeX, it does not handle OpenType fonts
well, is hard to extend, and it still has many hard-coded limits. This
is a team effort, with everybody from the core pdfTeX team
contributing. The big difference between me and the rest of the team is
that I am now working on it almost full-time.

Thanks to a grant from Colorado State University I can spend a
large amount of my office hours working on improving the Arabic
typesetting capabilities of pdfTeX, adding Unicode and OpenType font
support and assimilating bits of Aleph into pdfTeX — or rather,
into LuaTeX.

The LuaTeX project was started a while back as a means to extend
pdfTeX in an extensible way, by adding the Lua script interpreter to
the executable and giving Lua scripts access to the internals of the
typesetting engine. Also, there are plans to add MetaPost to the
executable as an embedded library.

Eventually, all of this work will result in a completely new
program called MetaTeX. This will be the successor of the current
pdfTeX (and probably Aleph), and the final non-MetaTeX pdfTeX
will become frozen and only updated for bug maintenance, for people that
do not want to move forward with us. We hope to have this all done by
the summer of next year.

DW: At the recent PracTeX Conference in New Jersey, I saw
Jonathan Kew demonstrate using the existing fonts within his operating
system with XeTeX — no big process of converting to the TeX
internal formats for font descriptions. Is what you are doing with
pdfTeX going to result in a system that will make working with fonts
that easy, or will it still require the conversion to the traditional
TeX formats for fonts? Also, is there communication between what you
are doing with pdfTeX and Jonathan's work on XeTeX? Is some further
consolidation there likely or possible?

TH: The goal is that for simple use of a font, like in XeTeX, OpenType
fonts can be used as they are, without any conversion. For harder
stuff, like hanging punctuation, pseudo-hz font expansion, and
top-quality Arabic typesetting, extra information is needed that is
normally not included in the font. Font loading and instantiation will
be under the complete control of the Lua script language, so it will be
possible to add that extra information using augmentation files instead
of actual font conversion.

There is some communication between us and XeTeX, but the two
projects have very different approaches to the problems of typesetting
engines, so neither of us is working towards a merge right now.

pdfTeX aims for the absolute best quality and as much
configurability as possible. Therefore, it does all typesetting tasks,
everything itself, often at the expense of more source code and
therefore longer development cycles. XeTeX aims for the highest ease of
use for users and economy of implementation. Therefore, it uses
external libraries for some of its tasks. The result is that XeTeX is
not able to do micro-typography like pdfTeX, and pdfTeX is way behind
XeTeX when it comes to Oriental script support.

Perhaps the projects will grow closer together in the future, but I
am not aware of any plans in that direction that are active right now.

DW: Scouting around, I also find your work on the koeieletters
and koeielogos fonts and your conversion of the Metafont logo font and a
couple of the other miscellaneous original TeX system fonts into Type 1.
Can you say a word about the motivations for these?

TH: The older fonts I needed for internal use at Kluwer. They were
converted using Richard Kinch's metafog. In fact, I was also
commissioned to created an extended math font set for Kluwer, using the
same production process. That font set never got to production quality,
but I still have a thousand plus Metafont glyphs in an archive
somewhere.

I feel fonts are a very interesting subject, so I've been playing
with them now and again for quite some time. The koeieletters font is
the most fun (and funniest) thing I've worked on in years. Because of
their graphical nature, fonts are closer to art than to programming,
and I would love to earn my money creating fonts. Sadly, that does not
seem feasible, so I am stuck with TeX and web application programming
for now.

DW: Your original interest in art history and philosophy seems
pretty distant from the set of skills you need for the work you are
doing today with TeX: Pascal, WEB, C, TeX, typesetting,
programming languages, PDF, etc. Or is there some connection with your
earlier interests or some different history and philosophy with which
you are now enthralled?

TH: Programming itself is quite distant. It turned out I am halfway
decent in it, and it pays the bills. Luckily, working on and with TeX
and MetaPost is closer to the arts than most other IT jobs. After all,
the goal is to create something that is as beautiful as possible. When
I see a medieval illuminated manuscript, I am always wondering how nice
it would be if we could make TeX produce documents that are just as
pretty.

DW: This has been fascinating, Taco. Let me ask you a couple of
somewhat philosophical questions and then we will be done. First, a
question I ask of most of my interviewees: What is your view of TUG and
the other user groups and how they can best, and practically, continue
to support TeX and TeX users and perhaps push the world of TeX ahead?

TH: The way I see it, the most important task of the user groups today
is facilitating developments that are taking place, stimulating
projects where needed. TeX is free software and the active user base is
fairly small, and as result there is not much of an external drive for
new developments. Forward movement has to come from within our own
community, and the user groups have a very important role in that
community. Since this is pretty much what the user groups are already
doing, I can only say: you are doing a fine job, keep at it!

DW: How does open-source/“free” software fit into your view of
the world? You are developing a lot of software and you say it is
“paying the bills”, but ....

TH: This is a tricky question. It is very easy to slip into a very long
monologue about the pros and cons of communism versus capitalism, and I
really do not want to do that. I prefer to think of programming as
providing a service, as opposed to the production of goods. Let's leave
it at that.

DW: Thank you very much for taking the time to participate in
this interview. Hearing about all the work you are doing has been
inspiring to me.